About Philosophy

Annual Spring Symposium

Saturday, April 22, 2017
1210 McClung Tower

The Many Faces of Kantian Freedom

Kant refers to freedom as the "keystone" or the "cardinal point" of his entire philosophy. Kant is perhaps chiefly concerned with the freedom of will that we take ourselves to have as moral agents whose choices merit praise or blame. However, freedom (as well as the closely related idea of "spontaneity") plays a central role in other central areas of Kant's philosophy as well: in his epistemology, he holds that that we freely judge the natural world in response to sensible input; and his aesthetics famously centres around the notion of a "free play" of imagination and intellect. This colloquium brings together Kant scholars that have explored these different faces of Kantian freedom in their work, and thus it hopes to shed light on how the many different (metaphysical, ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic) dimensions of Kantian freedom are to be understood in their own right and in relation to each other.